Collected Stories

This beautifully produced Library of Congress book collects all of Carver's stories, a few essays and also includes a chronology. If you've never read any Carver then a word of warning. This is not a book to be digested in one go. I have dipped into it over the course of eighteen months or so and for good reason - there is a bleakness to Carver's writing that can colour your worldview.

These are stories of real life. There are no heroes or heroines here, just ordinary people struggling to make sense of their lives. Each story is a snapshot, like looking through a window into somebody else's life, watching for a while, then turning away. Very few of these tales offer any kind of resolution. Instead we get stories of quiet desperation. Often lives, marriages are falling apart. People do things out of spite, weariness or just because it's what they have always done. Often a story will end with no one knowing what to say. The horror of awkwardness, of social entropy.

Carver's writing has been called “minimalist” but, as he himself says in one of the essays, that's only because he wanted to put down on the page exactly the right word or sentence. No fat, no decorative prose. Carver's minimalist reputation hinges on the savage editing by Gordon Lish of his second book of short stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Lish recognised the bleakness that runs through Carver's work and, with Carver suffering from the effects of alcoholism, suggested cuts that the author grudgingly agreed to. Some were cut by 75%. But it works. As a contrast this collection includes the original manuscript version before the cuts, here entitled Beginners.

Carver's stories have a timeless quality to them. There is very little to ground them in a particular time period. In that way they become universal. People are people wherever and whenever, and Carver writes exclusively about the human condition. But not in a philosophical way. We are left to draw our own inferences and conclusions from these tales.

Carver never wrote a novel. His domain was the short story and he's one of the masters of the craft. There's really no one quite like him.